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The Celluloid Oval Office

May 30, 2007 5:35 pmMay 30, 2007 5:35 pm

[Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article included an incorrect plot summary for the “The Contender.” In the film, the vice president, not the president, dies, and the character played by Joan Allen is a senator nominated to fill that post.]

Presidents. Hollywood. A match made in heaven, no?

In the beginning, that’s how it seemed. The first movie star was Theodore Roosevelt, not yet president but the organizer of several hundred cowboys and polo-playing socialites into what the press called “The Rough Riders.” Roosevelt’s exploits leading the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American war were re-enacted amid the potato fields of Long Island and presented as newsreel footage to audiences desperate for pictures from the front. Press acclaim made T.R. vice president; with the assassination of President William McKinley, he reached the White House at the age of 43.

The next president to feature in the history of American movies was Woodrow Wilson. The story line of W. D. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece, “The Birth of a Nation,” was drawn from a best-selling novel, “The Clansman,” but throughout the movie were quotations from the scholarly work of none other than the professor-president.

Wilson, Virginia-born and reared by a slave-owning father, had no quarrel with Griffith’s depiction of a heroic Ku Klux Klan restoring order across a South still hurting from the war and threatened by freed slaves lusting not only for power but also white women. When the movie was shown in the White House, Wilson rejoiced. It was, he reportedly said, “like history written with lightning.”

With the Depression came an interest in movies for propaganda purposes, something that stirred Franklin D. Roosevelt much as it had already done Lenin a decade earlier. What F.D.R. wanted was films that portrayed America as an epic, works such as Per Lorenz’s documentary “The Plough that Broke the Plains.” Uplifting and arty, such films were meant to restore faith in the country at a time when it seemed to be on its knees.

Still, there wasn’t much of an historical narrative to grab the attention of moviegoers as the wretched of the Earth watched their farms turn into dust and blow away. For that, the studios began to turn out the 35-millimeter equivalent of the historical novel, with articulate protagonists who, by force of character, would put the country to rights. No one stood taller in the redeemer stakes than Lincoln, who was the subject of three major films in the 1930s.

Yet the ultimate redeemer movie, “Gabriel Over the White House,” was entirely fictitious and seemed to promote fascism. Released in the same month as F.D.R.’s first inauguration, “Gabriel” had been financed by William Randolph Hearst. It told the story of a cheap political opportunist, Judson Hammond, a faux populist who owes his election to big business. Hammond is reckless by nature and crashes his car while driving at 100 m.p.h. On the brink of dying, he receives a visitor — the Archangel Gabriel, with a message from God: Hammond must save America.

Back in the world of the living, Hammond asserts to an indignant Congress that his powers as commander in chief would allow him to put the entire country under martial law. Congress stands aside, as does the Supreme Court. The new president puts the unemployed to work, destroys organized crime by executing a major gang boss, forces other countries to pay their World War I debts and presents such an overwhelming demonstration of American military power to other world leaders that they cave in to his demand and disarm. Having achieved peace and prosperity, Hammond dies.

In recent years this almost forgotten movie has been rediscovered, not least because of the obvious comparisons with the present incumbent of the White House, who also believes his actions are being directed by God, has an unbridled view of what he can do as commander in chief, and who tries to use America’s military power to intimidate countries from Iran to Venezuela.

The redeemer president appeared again during World War II, with “Wilson,” which received five Academy Awards. The dead president was depicted as a far-sighted idealist who sought world peace through the creation of the League of Nations, only to see his efforts thwarted by lesser men. Message: establish the United Nations, and this time it had better work, because we won’t get a third chance. A worthy effort, but like most worthy films, dull.

The Cold War brought some of the best portrayals of presidential power in films like “Fail-Safe,” “Seven Days in May” and the incomparable “Dr. Strangelove.” Such films put no faith in presidential infallibility. Instead, in “Fail-Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove” the villain is the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which would have killed up to a third of the world’s population and inflicted crippling illnesses on hundreds of millions more if unleashed. “Seven Days in May” depicts an attempted military coup by an Air Force general against a liberal Kennedyesque president who is trying to move the United States and the Soviet Union away from the nuclear arms race.

Here, then, were films about presidents who were, in various ways, tragic heroes. In “Fail-Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” the MAD mechanism proves to be beyond anyone’s control.

And then came Richard Nixon. What was new was the way the paranoia that Nixon exuded, encouraged and expected tainted the institution itself. Not only could you no longer trust the country’s leaders, you could not trust government itself. In “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” released in 1970, the president proves to be so incompetent and short-sighted that a system of supercomputers takes power away from the politicians and announces it now rules the world. A remake is in the works, directed by Ron Howard. It will be interesting to see whether the screenwriters have any recent president in mind.

By the 1970s, when the Watergate scandal broke, movie-makers began to see the presidency in a new and negative light. Until then, the institution itself was revered. Flawed men might occupy it temporarily, but in the end, the system invariably worked. That was obviously not the world depicted in the Watergate drama, “All the President’s Men.”

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, fascination with the Oval Office as a movie set rose spectacularly. More than a dozen major movies featuring presidents appeared in eight years, including “Primary Colors,” with a Clintonian protagonist, Gov. Jack Stanton, running for the White House. The candidate is a man with serious failings, but his embrace of sleaze-ball tactics to defeat a high-minded opponent is going to be justified (we are led to suppose) by his presidency, where all that’s best in Stanton will bring out all that’s best in the country he leads.

So far there have been no female presidents, but Hollywood cultivates an over-the-horizon vision. In 2000, as Clinton stepped down, the first post-Monica movie appeared, “The Contender.” In this film, the death of the vice president leads to the nomination of a female senator, played by Joan Allen, to fill the job. A scandal ensues with the circulation of rumors and photographs that seem to show her participating in college orgy more than 20 years before. This, as one film critic noted, raised a serious question: “Can a slut be president?”

It’s worth asking, because priapic men have been given a pass on this one since, well, the days of Warren G. Harding. Chances are, though, that in the real world, the first female president will be expected to live like a saint and a black president — a prospect already covered by “Deep Impact” and other movies — will have to be as charming and accomplished as Sydney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” But two things are certain: primero, there will eventually be female presidents and black presidents; segundo, there will be movies made about them.

Mr. Perret offers an excellent overview of the American Presidency as it has been depicted in major Hollywood films over the years. I was a bit surprised that he did not mention the 1995 Michael Douglas-Annette Benning vehicle, “The American President,” as it was for this movie that an elaborately realistic set of the Oval Office was constructed, which was later used throughout the television series “The West Wing.”

To my mind, the single most memorable Presidential moment in a Hollywood movie was the product of director Robert Zemeckis, who was widely criticized for using real news footage of President Clinton speaking about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in his 1997 adaptation of Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel “Contact.” Mr. Zemeckis made it appear that Clinton was cautioning the public not to draw any hasty conclusions about what appeared to be mankind’s first encounter with an alien, extraterrestrial intelligence. Watching the movie for the first time, the scene appeared to either be a startlingly realistic admission by a U.S. President of a REAL “E.T.”, or an unadvertised dramatic cameo appearance by the sitting Chief Executive in a work of popular fiction. It was neither, and the Clinton White House was among Mr. Zemeckis’ many critics for his use of that piece of news film in such a context.

America tends to define itself cinematically. Ronald Reagan was the beneficiary of this legacy. “The Birth of a Nation” made in 1915 set off a Klan revival and the eventual resurgence of a Southern coalition in charge of the nation’s affairs– punctuated by Strom Thurmond’s bolting from the GOP after Hubert Humphrey’s Civil Rights speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1948– to the police riot in Chicago in 1968 which denied the election to Humphrey and set the stage for Southern Democrats converting to the GOP– whose highwater point culminated in Newt Gingich over-reaching for power in his effort to impeach Bill Clinton.

If one were to wrap up the legacy of the Rove-Bush-Cheney years in cinematic terms it would be called Gone With the Wind. In order for America to get its second wind it will need to unspool its old conventional mentality and mothball it into a film archives of 20th century oddities– like the opening of the NY subway in 1904, or Hitler marching into Poland in 1939 and the Russians marching into Hungary in 1956. For those who want to keepsake those precious memories, folks of sensibility should have but one response, can it! Soufflés only rise, but once, and the time for Reaganism has passed.

The cardinal importance of film for propaganda to the masses was established by Goebbels, and perfected by Riefenstahl, in their time. This medium has been used for propaganda ever since.

Digital art has trumped film for propaganda in our time, which is plainly seen in by the effect of hyperviolent “us vs. them” video games designed to make military warriors and criminal thugs out of boys, beginning with infancy.

This same violence is seen in converted to internet pornography, captured mostly on digital film, toward the same end: the promotion of extreme violence in our “society.”

Pornography run through digital “games,” cartoons, and film, is made accessible to the very young, creating a violent youth culture from head to foot. There is no “adulthood” after this.

The reason for the Republican push to allow Schwarzenegger to run for President is clear: the “Terminator” movies make him a shoe-in for “heroic leader,” the “action star,” the celluloid god, of a puerile, violent, self-righteously abusive culture.

Can we see now the wisdom of the command, so long ago, against creating and worshiping the graven IMAGE? We now see its result.

“In “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” released in 1970, the president proves to be so incompetent and short-sighted that a system of supercomputers takes power away from the politicians and announces it now rules the world.”

That statement is a distortion. The president, a sort of Kennedy type, had no control over Colossus from the beginning. But then neither does the inventor of Colossus.

The computer did exactly what it was designed and programmed to do. Protection to keep the computer out of human hands was built into the facility.

The film is more a warning about not knowing what it is we humans really create when something is discovered or created, be it the phonograph, light bulb, automobile, television, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, or a super computer. They all have a way of creating consiquences far beyond what was origionally concieved.

The president in this movie was just as competent as the rest of the species in these matters.

Let’s not forget the astonishing relevance of “Wag the Dog,” a wildly prescient tale of how a war, say like Iraq, could be conceived, orchestrated, staged, debuted, defended, sloganeered, waged, redefended, and now being surged. Except in the movie no one died and the war stopped after the election is secured. So much for the literary sense of the Bush administration.

Never has any movie more clearly equated re-election with war-making as does this masterpiece — it’s almost as if Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, in fabricating their pre-emptive invasion and stooge “war president” studying how to pull off wagging the dog. And it’s first class movie-making, with the deranged Harrelson character bringing it all to earth, so to speak, with humor and horror (talk about sacrifices for your country).

And it could be re-released as a public warning before the next election and the one after that and the one after that.

This is an entertaining article, but one must take exception to the phrase, “Press acclaim made T.R. vice president…”. As is not uncommon in the news media, Mr. Perret seems to have succumbed to the temptation to overestimate the importance of the press. Theodore Roosevelt certainly received prominent and positive press coverage, but that is not quite the same as saying that it “made” him vice president. Roosevelt was in fact unusually qualified for the post, having served on the U.S. Civil Service Commission and as President of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. Indeed, it was his governorship of a large state that probably contributed most directly to his selection as running mate to William McKinley.